A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler is a Vassar alum, class of 1990. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters as Senior Marketer for Corporate Counsel. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Monday, February 08, 2010

Awesomer was the second anthology benefiting the Indy Spinner Rack podcast, published by the awesome guys at Top Shelf back in June of 2009. It's edited by entities calling themselves "Charlito" and "Mr. Phil," which is mildly disconcerting, but I'll forgive that in my love for Top Shelf and for a cheap anthology (I found this for half-price back before Christmas) full of creators I don't know already.

The cover is by Jeff Smith, whom I do know -- and I hope you do, too.

Actually, there are plenty of people here whose work I'm familiar with: Jeff "Essex County Trilogy" Lemire, Julia "Fart Party" Wertz, Chris "Crogan's {Foo}" Schweizer, Alex "Box Office Poison" Robinson, and people like Miss Lasko-Gross, Sarah Glidden, and Fred Van Lente, whom I don't feel compelled to shove the title of one of their works into the middle of their names. The two hundred pages of comics here include 54 stories -- obviously, all pretty short ones -- by those names and many more.

The styles are all over the map, from the vaguely satirical funny-animal antics of "Party-Poohper" by Jon Adams and Waltoon to the clean-lined historical fiction of Jesse Post and Fred Chao's "The Greater Escape" to the creepy, carefully rendered family story "Widows" by Rantz Hosely and Salgood Sam. Everything in here is at least pretty good, though. Some of it is awfully weird, and a lot of it is silly, but, still -- fifty-four stories in two hundred pages, by a whole bunch of people. Unless the only thing you like about comics is characters older than your parents hitting each other, you'll find something to enjoy here.